Russia

ZiL lanes (also sometimes called “Chaika lanes”) are lanes on some principal roads in Moscow dedicated to vehicles carrying senior government officials. Known officially in Russian as rezervniye polosy (“reserved lanes”), they took their nickname from the black limousines produced by ZiL and the luxury Chaika cars that were used by officials of the Soviet Union as their official vehicles. ZiL lanes emerged in the 1960s during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, replacing the previous system of having other vehicles flagged down to make way for those of top officials. The lanes were inserted into the middle of some of Moscow’s main highways in place of the central reservations and were off-limits to all but authorised civilian and emergency service vehicles.

The remote Arctic island in Siberia is believed to be the final place on Earth to support woolly mammoths as an isolated population until their extinction about 2000 BCE, making them the most recent surviving population known to science.